An exhibition in the newly refurbished galleries explores 100 years of studio pottery.
Photograph: Tate

Tate galleries’ Cornish outpost, Tate St Ives, has reopened after a refurbishment project during which the gallery shut its doors for 18 months.

The gallery, which sits on the golden sands of Porthmeor Beach, Cornwall, and is just round the corner from the house once occupied by sculptor Barbara Hepworth, was due to be shut for only six months.

However, problems with the gallery building – which first opened in 1993 – kept it shut for an extra year, which the Tate St Ives executive director, Mark Osterfield, admitted had hit both the gallery and the local community hard.

“I feel quite emotional about it,” he said. “It feels like we’ve got back to the heart of what we’re about, the soul of the thing has returned. It was really tough being closed for 18 months, it really had an impact on us at the gallery and also on the town.”

He added: “Though some people are reluctant to admit it, St Ives to some degree depends on this gallery and it has been quite challenging for businesses over the winter period, particularly not to have the visitors who are coming to Tate.”

Queues began to form at the gallery doors on Friday morning before the reopening, and the storms from the night before had cleared to make way for blue skies and sunshine.

Local resident Dell Casdagli was among the first through the doors. “It’s tremendous, we’ve all been waiting for it for so long,” she said. “It’s been greatly missed in the town and none of us knew what was happening. It was only supposed to be closed for about three months. Today you can feel there’s a wonderful atmosphere that’s taken over the town. It’s brought that buzz back again.”

Tate St Ives is one of four Tate galleries – the others are Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool.

The reopening marks the first phase of the gallery’s vast expansion project, which has been almost 15 years in the works. In the autumn, a new 500 sq metresgallery extension built into the rocks behind the original building will finally open its doors.

Consultation for the project began in 2003, and immediately met resistance from locals, though they finally approved the plan to build not upwards but into the cliffs. The cost of the expansion has also soared from an original £12m to almost £20m.

Osterfield, who has worked on the extension since he arrived eight years ago, admitted it had been a “challenge to get the planets to align” but said the work would definitely be finished in the summer. “I’m calling this the year of fruition,” he said.

The reopening coincides with the arrival of a new artistic director for Tate St Ives, Anne Barlow, who took over when Sam Thorne left after just two years in the role.

The exhibition opening the gallery is twofold. On display in the large curved gallery, which looks out over the Atlantic Ocean, is one of the largest sea paintings by British artist Jessica Warboys.

The piece, made up of splurges of yellow, violet, black and green scattered across vast strips of canvas, is part of an ongoing project in which she makes the works on the beach and uses the sand and the rhythm of the waves to dictate how the paint is shaped on the canvas. For her work at Tate St Ives, she made several of her canvases on a nearby beach.

“I take these raw canvases and immerse them in the waves,” said Warboys. “Through the motion of dragging and pulling these canvases, they get creased and folded and I then throw pigment on to the surface, and the wind and other variables interplay.

“It was a response to not actually having a fixed studio but also the motivation to make something on a theatrical scale, something which captured that element of performance and animation but on a static surface.”

In the newly refurbished galleries, another exhibition explores 100 years of studio pottery and brings together contemporary British ceramists including Jesse Wine and Aaron Angell, with works from Cornwall, Japan, the US west coast and the UK.

Angell, who runs the Troy Town Art Pottery out of his studio in Hoxton, east London – described as a “radical and psychedelic workshop for artists” – curated one of the rooms in the show, filling it with his own work, new work by 20 artists he had hosted in the Troy Town studio, and historical pieces of pottery dating from 200BC to the early 1990s.

The exhibition’s blend of the historic and the contemporary fitted with the ethos of St Ives, said Osterfield.

“The reason Tate came to St Ives was because in the mid-20th century this place was a hub of radicalism and innovation,” he said. “It wasn’t provincial. There was this international outlook, and this exhibition recognises that legacy. It has work coming in from Japan crossing over to the west coast of America and then back up to London, but of course also back down to Cornwall.”

• This article was amended on 3 April 2017. The new gallery extension built into the rocks behind the original building will be 500 sq metres, not 500 sq ft as an earlier version said.